…you get Yahoo Finance results. (You can also tab through to Fool.com, MSN and others, but I’d wager no one does). Now, we all know this, and it’s been this way for quite a while. But while I was in New York today I had the chance to speak with Gordon Crovitz, who runs the electronic arm of Dow Jones, including the WSJ.com. And in conversation the question came up – why does Yahoo Finance come up first? Was it a business development deal? An algorithmic decision (perhaps it’s the most popular site for stock quote searches?) A vestige of an earlier time when someone just coded it that way, liked Yahoo, and there you have it?
Clearly, Dow Jones would love for that stock quote search to end up on, oh, perhaps its new Marketwatch site. And, come to think of it, there are any number of sites that would like to have the lucrative traffic which these kind of structured Google searches dole out. So it made me wonder, what is the criteria by which this decision was made? I’ve lobbed a call into big G and big Y to find out, but in the meantime, do any of you have an explanation? The answer has some implications as to how Google and other search engines might interact with media and content players in the future.
